Friday, September 25, 2009

A thread over on PlusHeal got me thinking about my PvE healing style. One of the reasons I have trouble as DPS is the notion of ability rotation. There IS no rotation as a holy priest. Well, after the inital tank cast. It's like as series of IF... THEN statements.

I lean heavily on shield/renew to prevent damage and keep people topped up. In the current patch, I've been stopcasting GHeals on the tank, and only using flashes when they're free or I have to hit multiple people in a short time span. I've gotten pretty good at always using the free flash. Having sparks shoot out from under my feet helps.

1. Open with PoM, Shield. Keep tank in range and hit with renew about 1 tick after the tank gains aggro.

2. IF the tank is a DK, I try and keep my shield up the entire fight. I leave gaps with rage users and pallies when the fight's not too intense to help them do their tank thing.

3. IF I see an aggro indicator on another player, I throw them a renew. If there seem to be a lot of people with aggro, I'll toss a PoM on the person who seems to be taking the most damage.

4. IF the damage is being caused by disease or magic I will abolish/dispel as needed. This is a pretty high priority for me. I spend a lot of time keeping debuffs to a minimum.

5. IF a player other than the tank has lost about a quarter health, I'll flash or gheal them when I can, depending on how much health is lost. 9k is about where I switch from flash to gheal. If it's more serious than that, I'll throw a new shield->renew->PoM on the tank, then renew->flash->greater the DPS.

6. IF things are really getting hairy with the DPS and myself taking damage, I'll usually damage control with PoH if it will heal more than the incoming damage.

7. If multiple people are going critical or the tank is taking massive damage, I'll activate a trinket if I'm wearing one that requires it, throw a guardian spirit/renew/PoM/shield on the tank, do a circle and a PoH if I have time, then start shield/renewing the DPS. At that point I usually have to start deciding which DPS is the priority to keep up.

8. MSBT tells me when my health/mana is running low. I have it set to a pretty high threshhold. IF it's health, I'll generally shield->renew->flash. IF it's mana, I'll let out my puppy if it's available, or use the Hymn of Hope. If I'm out of options, I'll use a health or mana pot.

9. IF I get bored because I'm overgeared, which happens more and more lately, I switch to my second bar, which replaces some of my emergency heals with dots, pw:d, smite/blast, etc. I still have the DPS part of my holy nova "turned on" so I like to run in and start spamming it when I'm really bored. I've outDPSed people in lower level dungeons before.

10. On top of all this, I'm constantly moving. Running, jumping on top of stuff, repositioning, watching for fires and pats, etc. I love having so many run and heal possibilites.

Things I could improve
-I could probably wait to throw on the renew until after the first shield wears off. I would need more Grid indicators for that.

-I could probably pay more attention to where the PoM bounce is so I don't overwrite one already present on the tank. I don't think that happens very often though.

-I could do more dispels on the tank's target. I'm sure there are occasionally things that I can dispel to help out the DPS

-I always forget about binding heal

-I should use Divine Hymn more. I know it's awesome, but I have this thing against using it unless I'm really desperate, which isn't really the best way to use a group heal

-I'm better about Hymn of Hope, but I should still use it more

-I'm bad at using lock cookies and mana potions early in the fight, which is really the ideal time to do it.

-It's been a while since I revewed my talent tree. A few patches have gone by, so there may be some tweaks to do